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Going to College 



Waitman Barbe, A.M., M.S. 

Assistant to the President op 
West Virginia University 



^^>ot -^^ 



Witri the Opinions of Tiftv Leading 

College Presidents and 

Educators 







4017S 

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY 
WAITMAIJ BARBE. 

All Rights Reserved. 

TWO COPIES «£cen^ea. 







PREFATORY NOTE, 



IN presenting the reasons why young 
men and young women should go to 
college, two things are taken for granted. 

First — That the college is a good one, 
with thorough courses of study and no 
"short cuts;" that it is well equipped with 
library and laboratories, and that the in- 
structors are specialists in their respective 
fields. 

S:BCONd — That the student has fair 

ability, and goes to college with serious 

purpose. 

W. B. 



Wkst Virginia University, 
May 1, 1899. 



CHAPTERS. 



I. From a Practicai, Standpoint. 
II. Bett£;r Reasons. 

III. Opinions of the Great Educa- 

tors. 

IV. C0NC1.US10N OF THE WH01.E Matter. 



<Bom0 to Coffe^e. 



From a Practicai, Standpoint. 

THK most important subject that can 
possibly engage the attention of 
young men and young women is tbe 
question of their education. A seeming 
exception is the subject the preachers tell 
us about every Sunday in the churches; 
but the two are so closely related that no 
philosopher can tell where the one ends and 
the other begins. The purpose of each is 
the same — that men and women "might 
have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly." When Aristotle was asked 
in what way the educated differ from the 
uneducated, he replied: "As the living 
differ from the dead." 

This supreme place for education is based 
upon the conception of the infinite worth of 
the human personaHty — that great human- 
itarian ideal, which, as Professor Williams 
5 



(Botng fo ^ffege. 



says, was first enunciated by Christ, but 
whicli was wholly lost from view for more 
than ten centuries; for this doctrine of the 
infinite and eternal worth of the individual 
has as its natural correlative the need of 
the highest and most careful education of 
the individual. 

Upon this great principle higher educa- 
tion is building its work more and more. 
At first the American college was ecclesi- 
astical, and young men went to college to 
study church creeds. Here and there may 
still be found men and women whose love of 
creed is stronger than their love of human- 
ity or of heaven; but they have the spirit 
of that old time when it was believed that 
there was a ' ' Presbyterian calculus, or a 
Congregational Demosthenes, or a Baptist 
interpretation of Horace, or a Methodist 
astronomy." With the coming of the 
French influence at the close of the Revo- 
lution the American college became civil 
and political. To-day it has passed to a 
broader and higher plane, and has for its 
object the preparation of men' and women 
for "complete living." 



(^ns io Coffege. 



My purpose in this little book is to point 
out the reasons why young men and young 
women should go to college; and I shall 
give not only the reasons which have oc- 
curred to me, but shall add to them those 
of the most eminent educators in this 
country. 

It is important to observe in the begin- 
ning that the testimony of witnesses is all 
on one side. I suppose there never lived a 
man or woman who regretted having taken 
a college course, no matter how great the 
sacrifice. We may regret almost any other 
step in life, but I believe it is safe to say 
that there is not a college graduate in the 
world to-day, who went to college with 
serious and honest purpose, who will not 
say it was time, money, and labor wjell 
spent. On the other hand, thousands and 
thousands of people regret the fact that 
they did not take advantage of. their edu- 
cational opportunities, or that they did not 
create opportunities if none appeared. The 
witnesses are all of one mind, and the case 
is proved in court. Please observe that the 
testimony is from those who know most 
7 



(Boing (o Coffege. 



about it. It seems to me that very few 
propositions can be proved so conclusively. 
In taking this evidence it is not fair to 
listen to those who have been sifted through 
and have fallen out at the bottom of the 
college without graduation, but only to 
those who have come out at the top. 

Chauncey M. Depew in a recent address 
said: "It has been my fortune for twenty- 
five years, as attorney, as counsel, as busi- 
ness associate in many enterprises, to be- 
come intimately acquainted with hundreds of 
men who, without any equipment of educa- 
tion, have accumulated millions of dollars. 
I never met with any one of them whose 
regret was not profound and deep that he 
had not an education. I never met one of 
them who did not lament either the neglect 
of his parents or his own poor opportunities 
that failed to give him the equipment. I 
never met one of them who did not feel in 
the presence of cultured people a certain 
sense of mortification which no money paid 
for. I never met one of them who was not 
prepared to sacrifice his whole fortune that 
his boy should never feel that mortification. ' ' 
8 



<Boiti0 fo ^ofPege. 



In order to present the question from an- 
other point of view, I want to make a bar- 
gain with the young m.en and j'oung women 
who read this. I want to buy everything 
you know. I want to buy everything you 
have ever learned in school, even your abil- 
ity to read and write, and it is to be stipu- 
lated that under no circumstances can you 
ever get any of these things back. I want 
to sweep out of your lives forever all of the 
knowledge and culture and sweetness and 
fairness which have come into them through 
this process which we call education. What 
will you take for what you already know? 
Would you sell it for all of the wealth of 
the richest man in the State ? ' ' The mer- 
chandise of it is better than the merchan- 
dise of silver, and the gain thereof than 
fine gold. ' ' And do you not prize and ap- 
preciate it more than you did when you 
were in the lower grades of the public 
school? Even so when you go to college 
your appreciation will grow stronger and 
stronger. I once heard a young man in 
the freshman class say that he would rather 
lose his good right arm than the result of 



<Boin0 fo Coffege. 



his year's work in college. If education is 
something you would not sell for any 
amount of gold, is not a higher and broader 
education worth working for? 
I As a simple business bargain, it pays to 
go to college. Because of State and na- 
tional aid or private endowments, the stu- 
dent receives instruction and the use of 
laboratories and libraries at a small fraction 
of their cost. At the State universities, 
where tuition is free, students receive for 
almost nothing the rich gifts which have cost 
hundreds of thousands of dollars. I know 
of no better business bargain which the 
keen American youth could make than this. 
Never again in his life will the odds be so 
greatly in his favor. It is the only place 
he will ever find where something really 
valuable can be had for nothing. Even at 
the universities charging the highest tui- 
tion the student pays but a small fraction 
of the cost of his education. In some cases 
millions of dollars' worth of equipment and 
brains are at his service for a small fee. 
/]/ It also pays from the bread - and - butter 
standpoint. Carefully compiled statistics 
10 



show tliat college-bred men and women earn 
upon an average three hundred per cent 
more than those who do not have a college 
education. In the educational section at 
the World's Fair was a diagram graphically 
illustrating this important fact. 

The following demonstration of the money 
value of an education has been published in 
various journals: 

It is fair to assume that uneducated labor 
does not earn, upon the average, more than 
$1.50 a day. It is also fair to assume that 
thoroughly educated men earn, upon the 
average, $1,000 per year. Then the dem- 
onstration is as follows: 

$1.50, the value of a day of uneducated labor. 

$1.50x300 days ^ $450, value of a year of un- 
educated labor. 

I450 X 40 years = $18,000, value of a life of un- 
educated labor. 

$1,000x40 years = $40,000, value of a life of 
educated labor. 

$40,000 — $18,000 = $22,000, value of an educa- 
tion. 

The last census shows that as a rule the 
earning power of the industrial classes rises 
as the percentage of illiteracy falls — a con- 
11 



(Botng io Coffegc. 



elusion reached, after a full investigation, 
more than half a century ago by Horace 
Mann. As Superintendent Nathan C. 
Schaeffer says: "Give a youth the ad- 
vantages of a good high-school training, 
and you have immensely multiplied his 
chances of success. Give him the benefit 
of a thorough college training, and you 
have given him the weapons which, if 
rightly used, will ensure a victory in fight- 
ing life's battles." 

H. E. Kratz, now superintendent of 
schools at Sioux City, Iowa, recently made 
some investigations in South Dakota as to 
the practical value of education, and came 
to the conclusion that even in the stirring 
West the college-bred man has multiplied 
his chances of success fifty times, and that 
even in business pursuits a college training 
multiplies his chances of success about 
twenty-five times. 

The per cent of college men who go into 
business increases every year, and that the 
higher education is a good training for a 
business career is admitted. One-third of 
the graduates of Harvard enter business. 
12 



(BoCng fo CofPege. 



The college man is trained to the habit of 
sustained application and systematic work. 
He "knows how to work patiently and 
hard, and how to wrestle with new ques- 
tions, how to keep at a thing until he mas- 
ters it; and this is the very essence of the 
habit of business." Or, as Professor Jud- 
son says further, ' ' He has ready command 
of the tool which every business man must 
use — his head. Higher education suppljies 
both knowledge and power, and of these, 
power is the more important, A business 
man's resources cannot all be deposited in 
the bank. They include three separate 
things — what he has, what he is in himself, 
and the good opinion of his fellow-men. 
Without any one of these three a man is 
handicapped, and he can hardly get the first 
and third unless he has in himself the four 
prime qualities of industry, intelligence, 
acuteness, and reliability." 

In an address made at the dedication of 
the new high- school building at New Bri- 
tain, Conn., Dr. A. E. Winship, editor of 
\}ci& Journal of Education ^ told the following: 

' ' I was the means of getting a Harvard 
13 



(Bomg fo ^ffege. 



graduate into one of the largest publishing 
houses of Boston, and he had but $3.00 a 
week, and began behind every other boy, 
sweeping out the dirtiest rooms, but in a 
month he was no longer a boy, but was 'on 
the stock.' In two months more he was a 
salesman, having jumped all those who 
worked for weekly wages, and found him- 
self on a salary. Not one of the boys and 
men whom he passed in his rapid flight was 
jealous of his promotion, for he was one 
with them when he staid with them; he 
simply distanced them all, and they saw it 
sooner than he. They knew that his train- 
ing left them no chance in the race for pro- 
motion. 

' ' In another large house two young men 
began on the same low level, one a Yale 
graduate, the other a mighty bright boy 
from a New Hampshire farm, the genius of 
his native town. The latter was unques- 
tionably the brighter boy, and he was well 
read, a self-trained scholar. The first pro- 
motion and the second came to the bright 
country youth. Then the college-trained 
man came up with him, passed him, dis- 
14 



<Botng io ^fPege. 



tanced him, because lie had vastly greater 
resources." 

In drawing his conclusions Mr. "Winship 
said: 

'%et it not be inferred that the high 
school or college training can take the 
place of talent or industry. No school 
makes brains. Brains without training is 
better than training without brains; but 
every man in this age will make vastly bet- 
ter use of his talent if he be trained." 

The Cosmopolitan Magazine, a year or 
two ago, published the opinions of several 
successful business men and politicians of 
New York on the practical value of college 
training. I shall quote some representative 
answers. Kx-Mayor Strong said that if he 
had to choose between two applicants for a 
position, the one a college-bred man, the 
other a smart young fellow with only a 
common-school education, he would engage 
the college graduate, if he displayed an equal 
capacity for work. Ex- Governor Roswell 
P. Flower said that he considered a college 
education the greatest boon that can fall to 
the lot of a boy endowed with a clever and 
15 



<Bom0 fo ^o^ege. 



active mind and a wholesome thirst for 
knowledge, adding: "I never felt the lack 
of a college education until I entered poli- 
tics. I was then forty-five years old, and 
my endeavors to master the various subjects 
that came before me in the House or in the 
committee rooms of Congress were sadly 
hampered by my want of fundamental 
knowledge." Mr. Seligman, a Wall Street 
magnate, said: "In my business I prefer 
men who have received a college education. 
In every walk of life the necessity of higher 
education is becoming more and more appar- 
ent all the time." Chauncey M. Depew's 
opinion was this : ' 'American independence 
and the founding of our nation upon con- 
stitutional lines, embodying the experience 
and the lessons of the ages, was the work 
of the graduates of the colonial colleges. 
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and 
William and Mary were the architects of 
the Declaration of Independence, of the 
Constitution of the United States, and of 
the incomparable system of executive, leg- 
islative, and judicial independence and 
interdependence which have survived so 
16 



(Boing fo Coffege. 



successfully a century of extraordinary trial 
and unprecedented development. Samuel 
Adams, in his commencement thesis at 
Harvard, struck the keynote of colonial 
resistance. John Morin Scott brought from 
Yale to New York the lessons which pre- 
pared that rich and prosperous colony for 
the sacrifices of the Rebellion. Alexander 
Hamilton, a student of Columbia, though 
only seventeen years of age, educated the 
popular mind to the necessity of the strug- 
gle; while the pen of Jefferson, of William 
and Mary College, wrote that immortal docu- 
ment which lives and will live forever as the 
most complete charter of liberty. The best 
proof of a college education in all the pur- 
suits of life is to be found in the eminent 
success of those who have enjoyed it, in the 
higher walks of the professions, of states- 
manship, of business." 

President Thwing says of the college 
course as a business training : ' ' The simple 
truth is that the college man entering busi- 
ness does not spend so long a time learning 
the elements of his calling as the boy whose 
formal education ceased at fifteen. The 
17 



(Boing io Coiftst. 



following concrete assumption does not put 
tlie question in a form too strong: Two 
boys are each of the age of eighteen; their 
abilities are equal; their training has been 
identical; both propose to become mer- 
chants or manufacturers. On leaving the 
high school, John enters business; on leav- 
ing the high school, Edgar enters college. 
Four years pass; John has become the mas- 
ter of many details and of the chief prin- 
ciples of his work. In these same four 
years Bdgar has secured his college educa- 
tion. Each has become of the age of 
twenty-two. The day following commence- 
ment Edgar puts on his overalls and begins 
where John began four years before. In 
six months Edgar will have come to know 
the business as well as John has learned it 
in the first year; in the first year Edgar 
will have come to know the business as well 
as John had learned it in the first two and 
a half years; in the first two years Edgar 
will have learned more than John had 
learned in the first five years;- in his first 
four Edgar will have caught up in knowl- 
edge and efficiency with John, knowledge 
18 



(Botns fo ^ffege. 



and efficiency which John secured in his 
eight years, and from this time Edgar will 
go ahead of John with a swiftness, increas- 
ing with each succeeding year. In hun- 
dreds of factories and shops and stores this 
assumption is proved to be the absolute 
truth. And the reason of it is clear 
enough; the college man has been taught 
to see, to think, to judge. It is the ques- 
tion of the trained athlete against untrained 
strength, of the disciplined soldier against 
raw bravery. ' ' 

In a group of sixty-five graduates in New 
York can be found eighteen bankers, fifteen 
leading railroad managers, ten manufac- 
turers, ten merchants, seven presidents of 
chief insurance companies, and five con- 
spicuous publishers. Mr. Chauncey M. 
Depew, the President of the New York 
Central Railroad, is reported to have said 
that hundreds of college men have begun 
at the bottom in railroad work and have 
soon distanced the uneducated boy and 
man. Again, quoting the manager of a 
great insurance company: "A boy can 
learn to measure tape or retail groceries 
19 



(Boing fo CofPege. 



without a college education, but for the 
management of men and the control of 
large enterprises, the more complete and 
thorough his training, the more likely he is 
to be successful. " 

^ Another practical advantage of college 
life to the man of affairs should not be for- 
gotten. During these four years he will 
become personally acquainted with hun- 
dreds of young men and young women who 
will become leaders in their communities, 
and their acquaintance and friendship will 
be of inestimable value to him throughout 
his life. College friendships are never for- 
gotten, and the "boys" stand by one an- 
other through good and evil report. Hun- 
dreds of men have been placed in political 
o£&ce, in good business positions, in influen- 
tial pulpits, in high educational places by 
their college friends. But this is the purely 
selfish and utilitarian side. These college 
friendships ask not for reward or service, 
though they are willing to give them. ' ' I 
have forgotten my chemistry," says Alice 
Freeman Palmer in an address which every 
girl should read, ' ' and my classical phi- 
20 



(Botn0 io ^C^ege. 



lology cannot bear examination; but all 
round tbe world there are men and women 
at work, my intimates of college days, wbo 
have made the wide earth a friendly place 
to me. Of every creed, of every party, in 
far-away places and in near, the thought of 
them makes me more courageous in duty 
and more faithful to opportunity, though 
for many years we may not have had time 
to write each other a letter. ' ' 

C. W. Bardeen, the editor and publisher 
of educational literature, in an address on 
' ' Teaching as a Business, ' ' says that schools 
that pay good wages want college graduates, 
and though in New York graduates of the 
classical course in the normal schools begin, 
as teachers, on a level with collegians, they 
do not rise so fast and their limit is much 
lower. Some good places are filled by men 
without college training, "but" says Mr. 
Bardeen, * ' there is no such man who does 
not regret that he is not a graduate. He 
knows that his home-made armor has cost 
him dear, and that with all his labor it has 
fissures here and there that gape open at 
unhappy crises. If he had not the discrim- 
21 



(Boing fo CoK^c. 



ination to recognize this, he would not have 
the discrimination to hold his place; and 
he is always the first to urge upon young 
men the commercial value of a broad and 
thorough education. Within a few years 
the college graduate has become an import- 
ant factor in the selection of women teach- 
ers. They seem likely to assume virtual 
control of the best positions. The demon- 
stration is even more positive than in the 
case of men, that mental discipline is worth 
paying for; and if it is obtained without 
sacrifice of health, it affords a capital likely 
to pay a liberal dividend." 
,y College men have the best prospect of 
rising to eminence and distinction. Presi- 
dent Bashford says : 

"It is estimated that one person in fifteen 
hundred in the United States is a college 
graduate. Yet over fifty per cent of the 
leading representatives of our Government — 
congressmen, senators, supreme court judges, 
and presidents are drawn from this mere 
handful of our citizens. If we turn to the 
profeSvSions, the facts are still more striking. 
More than seventy per cent of the leading 
22 



(Botng fo C^ofPege. 



clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and authors 
are college graduates. ' ' 

An editorial in The Nation calls attention 
to the large per cent of college graduates 
among the fifty -three Massachusetts "Im- 
mortals ' ' whose names appear on the drum 
of the dome of the new House of Repre- 
sentatives in Boston. Forty of the fifty- 
three men representing the highest attain- 
ments in the civic life, the literature, art, 
and science of Massachusetts since the com- 
ing of the Pilgrims were college men. Among 
them are such luminous names as Morse, 
Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Emer- 
son, Holmes, I^owell, I^ongfellow, Haw- 
thorne, Bryant, Channing, PhilUps Brooks, 
Jonathan Edwards, Choate, Webster, John 
Adams, John Q. Adams, Sumner, Story, 
Wendell Phillips, Agassiz, and Horace 
Mann. 

In this connection I shall quote freely from 
the interesting facts gathered by Dr. Thwing. 
He made an examination of the fifteen 
thousand sketches of the eminent Americans 
in "Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American 
Biography, ' ' to ascertain how many of these 



(Boing fo CofPege. 



persons are college graduates, and how 
many are not. Of the 1 5 , 000 persons, 5,326 
are college men. The whole number of 
graduates of American colleges from the 
beginning to the present time does not ex- 
ceed 200,000. The number is nearer 150,- 
000. Therefore, at least one in every forty 
has risen to distinction. Dr. Thwing as- 
sumes that at least a hundred millions of 
people who have lived and died in this 
country have not had a college training. 
Yet out of these hundred millions only ten 
thousand have risen to distinction — only 
one out of every ten thousand. But of the 
college men, one in every forty has attained 
such recognition. Into one group gather 
together ten thousand children and send no 
one to college: one person out of that 
great gathering will attain a certain fame. 
Into another group gather forty college 
men on the day of their graduation, and, 
out of these forty, one will attain eminence. 
The proportion in favor of the college man 
is two hundred and fifty to one. Kvery 
Chief Justice of the United States, with one 
exception, has been a college graduate, and 
24 



(Botns fo Coffege. 



that one, Jolin Marshall, was a student at 
William and Mary College when the out- 
break of the Revolution took him from his 
college studies. More than two-thirds of 
the judges of the Supreme Court have been 
college graduates. Every member of the 
present Supreme Court has received a 
higher education. Of the men who have 
been influential in the affairs of Rhode 
Island in the last century and a half, only 
three can be mentioned who have not been 
graduates of Brown University, and these 
three were connected with the University 
in such a way as to feel its influence. Of 
the thirty-two speakers of the National 
House of Representatives, sixteen have 
been college trained. Twelve of the twenty- 
four Presidents have been college graduates 
and some of the others have attended col- 
lege. Of the thirty-six Secretaries of State, 
twenty-eight were college bred. Our great- 
est poets, historians, philosophers, and theo- 
logians represent, with hardly an exception, 
a college training. Of the twenty- three 
most eminent English authors of the pres- 
ent generation, all but two have been trained 
25 



(Botng fo ^offege. 

at the universities. The seven colleges 
which were founded before 1770 in this 
country have, since the organization of our 
government, contributed more than two 
thousand of their graduates to the highest 
possible judicial and political ofl&ces. These 
seven colleges have helped to train no less 
than nine of our presidents and eleven vice- 
presidents; more than eighty cabinet offi- 
cers, and a hundred United States ministers 
to foreign countries; two hundred United 
States Senators; more than seven hundred 
members of Congress; four Chief Justices 
of the United States; at least eighteen as- 
sociate justices; eleven United States Cir- 
cuit Judges; about a hundred district and 
other United States judges; about six hun- 
dred judges of the higher State courts; 
and at least one hundred and fifty govern- 
ors of States. All this the "output" of 
seven colleges, to say nothing of the hun- 
dreds of graduates who have risen to dis- 
tinction in business, the professions, author- 
ship, the army, the navy, etc. Dr. Thwing 
has rendered a valuable service in collecting 
these significant facts, and I commend them 



(Botng io ^fPege. 



to the careful consideration of ambitious 
young men. 

Professor Jolin Carleton Jones has made 
some investigations in this same field and 
publishes the result in The Forum. The 
facts set forth in his paper are thus sum- 
marized by him: 

I St. The one per cent of college gradu- 
ates in our male population of graduate 
age is furnishing 36 per cent of the mem- 
bers of Congress, and has supplied 55 per 
cent of the Presidents, 54.16 per cent of 
the Vice-Presidents, nearly 55 per cent of 
all the Cabinet officers, nearly 69 per cent 
oi the Justices of the Supreme Court, and 
85.7 per cent of the Chief Justices. 

2d. The proportion of graduates in- 
creases in direct ratio to the importance of 
the office, if we consider elective and ap- 
pointive offices separately. In the latter class 
the order of the officers, arranging accord- 
ing to percentage of graduates, is as follows: 
Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, Jus- 
tices, Attorneys General, Secretaries of 
State, and other Cabinet officers where the 
margin of difference is quite small. 
27 



(Botng fo CofPege. 



3d. More college graduates than for- 
merly are being chosen to the Presidency, 
to the House of Representatives, to the 
most important positions in the Cabinet, 
and to the Supreme Bench. 

Concerning the influence of college grad- 
uates on our early political development, he 
discovers that the author of the Declaration 
of Independence was a college graduate; 
that its ablest defender was a college grad- 
uate; that of the sixty-five men who signed 
it, twenty were college graduates, and ten 
others had classical training; that two of 
the three men who led to the assembling of 
the Constitutional Convention were also 
college graduates; that the authors of three 
of the four plans submitted to the Conven- 
tion were college graduates; and that the 
man who won the name * ' Father of 
the Constitution" was also a graduate. 
Twenty-three of the fifty-four men com- 
posing the Convention were graduates; and 
the three men who contributed most toward 
its adoption by the States were also college 
graduates. 

In England practically all of the high 
, 28 



(Boing io ^ffege. 



places are filled by university-trained men, 
and in the United States this condition will 
prevail more and more as we grow in edu- 
cation and culture. 

When we speak of taking a college course, 
we usually mean the course leading to A. B. , 
B. S., Ph. B., or B. L., but "going to col- 
lege," or "going to the university," to- 
day very often means that the student is 
studying electrical, mining, civil, or me- 
chanical engineering, or law, or agriculture, 
or music, or painting. Most of these 
courses are eminently direct and ' ' practi- 
cal," leading to results which can be seen 
almost at once. Six young men were grad- 
uated last year in the civil engineering de- 
partment of a university with which I am 
intimately acquainted, and good positions 
were waiting for five of them the day of 
their graduation. It is the proud boast of 
that department of this institution that 
every one of its graduates has a desirable 
place. Thoroughly trained and competent 
engineers, lawyers, agriculturists, physi- 
cians, musicians, artists, are always in de- 
mand. I say "thoroughly trained and 



(Botng fo Coffege. 



competent," It would be interesting and 
profitable to compare the incomes of engi- 
neers, for example, with the incomes of 
young men of equal ability who have not 
gone to college. I have taken at random 
the names of sixteen ycung men from four 
different colleges who have graduated in 
civil, mining, or mechanical engineering, 
and find that within three years after grad- 
uation their average salaries were about 
$1,500. I have also ascertained that thir- 
teen of these sixteen were farmers' sons. 
Would these young men have earned an 
average of $1,500 a year on the farm if 
they had never gone to college? And all 
of them have prospects of rising higher 
within a few years. 



II. 

Bettkr Reasons. 

BUT the reasons for going to college so 
far given are not the most important. 
They are only secondary. There are 
considerations of more moment than those 
of wealth or place or distinction. I believe 
that most people hold a false notion of the 
influence of money. It is not now true, it 
never was true, and it never can be true, in 
any enlightened community, that we respect 
and esteem people according to the amount 
of money they possess. It is a most per- 
niciously false idea. "We all know that 
down in the bottom of our hearts we es- 
teem people for what we believe them to 
be, and not for what we believe them to 
have in bank. Culture and character are 
always and everywhere, among intelligent 
people, more respected than cash. Money 
may be able to overturn the chairs of state, 
but it cannot win a single heart. And it is 
with culture and character and knowledge 
31 



<Ek>in0 fo ^offege. 

and the high essences of life that the col- 
lege has to do rather than with the market 
place or the political race-course. "The 
purpose of education is not to make a living 
but to make a life." 

The old Greek poet Meander stated it, 
and St. Paul repeated it, that evil communi- 
cations corrupt good manners. The com- 
pany one keeps makes or unmakes him ; and 
this is as true of the mind as it is of morals 
and manners. Under no other conditions in 
the world is the mind of the young man or 
young woman likely to be in such good com- 
pany as when among the high and ennobling 
thoughts that crowd a college course. Day by 
day, year in and year out, he keeps company 
with the eternal verities. Truth that was 
old when Plato declared it, is his companion, 
and the thoughts that have preserved the 
world sweet and fair are his to have and to 
hold forever if he will. Kingdoms come 
and go, but the principles of mathematics 
abide. Political parties fight out their little 
battles and are forgotten ; but the song that 
Homer sang, or the law that binds atoms 
together, or the story of the birth of a 



(Boing io CofPege. 



mountain, will remain fresh and true for all 
time to inspire and strengthen and purify 
the minds that are open to receive. ' ' To 
turn from the petty troubles of the day to 
the thoughts of the masters, is to go from 
the noise of the street through the door of 
a cathedral." 

Thus it comes about that the educated 
man or woman gets more out of life, is 
happier, than the uneducated; for we get 
out of life exactly what we put into it, no 
more and no less. If the American youth 
could be made to understand that education 
means a larger and happier life, so many of 
them would not be sitting on store-boxes 
all the day long and carousing at night 
with drunken companions. They think 
that they are enjoying life, just as the horse- 
fiddle or the tin-horn thinks it makes as 
good music as the great organ or the 
Stradivarius violin. They cannot compre- 
hend the difference between the supposed 
pleasures of the coarse and ignorant, and 
the almost divine happiness that may come 
to the thoroughly educated and devoted 
spirit in the search and comprehension of 
33 



the truths that seem to fall as gifts of gold 
from Him who holds the world in the hol- 
low of His hand. ' ' I wonder what some 
people want with eternity when they do 
not know what to do with a half-hour here,' ' 
said Emerson. 

I think I have observed that old men and 
old women of meager education, or no edu- 
cation, constantly lament the departure of 
the days of their youth. They have laid up 
no stock in store for old age when the de- 
lights of youth can no longer be theirs. 
And I think I have observed that educated 
men and women in their old age continue 
to feed upon the rich stores of knowledge 
which they have collected and to tread the 
fair lanes of Athena which bloom for them 
in old age as in the spring of their lives. 
For education yields its delights without 
distinction to tottering age and buoyant 
youth. 

The higher education not only furnishes a 
constantly increasing store of happiness for 
age, but the years spent in college are just so 
many years added directly to the period of 
youth. This brings me to that profound 
34 



interpretation of the meaning of education 
given to it by John Fiske and Nicholas 
Murray Butler, which is indeed one of the 
most important generalizations of modern 
science. The child receives in a few years 
his physical inheritance, but he must spend 
years in gaining his human inheritance and 
in adjusting himself to his spiritual and 
intellectual environment. Let me quote 
Df. Butler: "No animal that has not a 
period of infancy needs to be educated. 
Every animal that has a period of infancy 
can and must be educated. The longer the 
period of infancy, the more education is 
possible for it; and as our civilization has 
become more complex, as its products have 
become more numerous, richer, deeper, and 
more far-reaching the longer we have ex- 
tended that period of tutelage, until now, 
while the physiological period of adoles- 
cence is reached in perhaps fourteen or 
fifteen years, the educational period of de- 
pendence is almost twice as long. That is 
to say, the length of time that it takes for 
the human child in this generation so to 
adapt himself to his surroundings as to be 
35 



(Boms fo CofPcge. 

able to succeed in them, to conquer them, 
and to make them his own is almost if not 
quite thirty years. ' ' He who stops school 
at eighteen has only begun to adjust him- 
self to his spiritual and intellectual environ- 
ment; he has only begun to come into his 
marvelous inheritance. But if he goes to 
college these college years will be added 
directly to the j^ears of his youth. Educa- 
tion is then well defined as " a gradual ad- 
justment to the spiritual possessions of the 
race;" it is a prolongation of the period of 
youth; it is " the vestibule of the highest 
and the richest type of living." 

And what are these intellectual posses- 
sions which are the rightful inheritance of 
every young man and young woman? Dr. 
Butler says that they are five-fold. The 
youth is entitled to his scientific inherit- 
ance, to his literary inheritance, to his es- 
thetic inheritance, to his institutional in- 
heritance, and to his religious inheritance. 
He has the same right to these possessions 
as he has to his physical inheritance, and 
unless he demands them, toils for them, 
and wins them, he is deprived of by far the 
36 



(Botng io ^offege. 



nobler part of his birthright. He is enti- 
tled to know nature and to know how it is 
that the heavens declare the glory of God; 
he is entitled to the resources of modern 
science and to the facts acquired by modern 
research. This is his scientific inheritance. 
He is entitled to know the great thoughts 
of the world' s great souls which have been 
preserved for him in literature; these great 
creations are in the world, and he is entitled 
to know what they are, and to be inspired 
by their possession. This is his literary 
inheritance. He is entitled to be taught to 
understand and appreciate the beautiful, 
the picturesque, and the sublime. This is 
his esthetic inheritance. He is entitled to 
know the history and development of the 
theories of government and society and 
human organization — why and how one 
form is good and another is bad. This is 
his institutional inheritance. He is enti- 
tled to know the influence of religion in 
shaping all civilizations, and especially our 
contemporary civilization. This is his re- 
ligious inheritance. These comprise his 
five-fold intellectual or spiritual inheritance 
37 



(Botng fo CofPege. 



— will he sell them for a mess of pottage, 
or will he toil for them as men toil for the 
treasures of earth, and thereby prolong the 
period of his youth, and in their getting, 
get life more abundantly ? 

Akin to this great thought is another. 
As uneducated men and women we live our 
little, narrow lives; and only as educated be- 
ings do we enter into the life and experience 
of the entire human race. That great edu- 
cational philosopher, Dr. William T. Harris, 
has made this thought peculiarly his own, 
and he develops it thus: 

"The uneducated consciousness of the 
mere animal does not enable him to take up 
the experience of his fellow-animals and 
appropriate its lessons in the form of moral 
and scientific ideas. Only to a small extent 
does he avail himself of the lives of others. 
Only the species live on while the individ- 
ual metamorphosis of life and death takes 
place. But the animal capable of educa- 
tion can go beyond his individual experi- 
ence and avail himself of the lives of all. 
For the educated there is vicarious experi- 
ence. He may live over in himself the 
38 



(Boing io ^ffege. 



lives of all others as well as his own life. 
In fact, each lives for all and all live for 
each on the plane of educated being. On 
this plane the individual may be said to 
ascend into the species, and we can no 
longer say of him what we may say of 
the mere animal — the species lives and the 
individual dies. For individual immortal- 
ity belongs to the being that can think 
ideas; because ideas embody the life ex- 
perience of the race and make possible the 
vicarious life of each in all. The religious 
mystery of vicarious atonement is, we may 
see, adumbrated in this deep fact of our 
spiritual existence. The mistakes and er- 
rors of each and every man, as well as his 
achievements and successes, all go into the 
common fund of experience of the race, 
and are converted into ideas that govern 
our lives through education. The human 
race lives and dies for the individual man. 
All the observations of the facts of the uni- 
verse, all thinking into the causes of those 
facts by this process, is rendered available 
for each man. He may reenforce his fee- 
ble individual might by the aggregate feel- 
39 



(Boing fo CofPege. 



ing and seeing and thinking of all men now 
living and of all that have lived. ' ' 

These two thoughts — our intellectual in- 
heritance, and our participating, as educated 
men and women, in the life and experience 
of the race — seem to me to be the profound- 
est generalizations in modern educational 
philosophy. They should make every earn- 
est young man or young woman stand un- 
covered with unutterable awe in the pres- 
ence of his responsibilities and his oppor- 
tunities. 

A young man once asked the President 
of Oberlin College if he could not take a 
shorter course. "Oh, yes," said the Presi- 
dent, ' ' but that depends on what you intend 
to make of yourself. When God wants to 
make an oak he takes a hundred years, but 
when He wants a squash he takes only six 
months." 

What we are in life depends almost wholly 
upon our ideals — whether we want to be 
an oak or a squash. The college gives to 
most students new and nobler ideals. Many 
young men and young women come from 
homes in which mercenary or social ideals 
40 



(BoCttg io Coffege. 



rule — homes in which the dollar or the new 
bonnet outweighs the holiest and highest 
human aspirations. The college gives to 
all such a new standard of values. 

Thus it comes about that the beginning of 
college life is the young man's renaissance. 
He will discover new worlds, and his horizon 
will be enlarged. Every college man can 
recall how his being expanded as the great 
secrets of science, and literature, and history 
were revealed to him. It was the period of 
his intellectual ' * new birth. " " From being 
a little man in a little world with little to 
know, there suddenly dawned upon him the 
possibiUty of becoming a great factor in a 
great world, with more to know than one 
head could contain. ' ' There is no truer 
maxim than that of Diesterweg, that ' ' Edu- 
cation is liberation." 

Again, every student of history knows 
the truth of Benjamin Kidd's statement 
that * ' the arrival of democracy is the fact 
of our time which overshadows all other 
facts. ' ' During the past twelve months it has 
reached another stadium on its conquering 
way. Now the most perfect democracy in 
41 



<Bo(ng fo CJoffege. 



the world is the college. Here as nowhere 
else brains, character, and application are 
the only qualities that count. The son of 
the United States Senator and the lad from 
the mountains sit side by side, and the 
latter is even more likely than the former 
to win the prizes and distinctions. Nobody 
cares who his grandfather was, nor how 
much his father is worth, but the questions 
are, What does he know? and, What can 
he do ? " Brain is the only symbol of aris- 
tocracy and the examination room the only 
field of honor. ' ' The poor girl and the rich 
become friends for life, ' ' for it is only 
when the rich and poor sit down together 
that either can understand how the Lord is 
the Maker of them all. " And neither rich 
nor poor ever learned a more wholesome 
lesson. The girl whose mother is empress 
in her social kingdom needs to learn that 
these things do not count in college, and 
the girl who teaches a country school to 
earn her way up to college needs to learn 
that she may become a queen indeed in the 
kingdom of culture. 

Open-minded college students also learn 
42 



(Boing fo C^ffege. 



by their association with young men and 
young women of other creeds and other 
parties, valuable lessons in religious and 
political toleration. John is a Baptist and 
a Democrat; his room-mate, Charles, is a 
Presbyterian and a Republican. Bach will 
learn to respect the opinions and religious 
inheritances of the other. Mary, who has 
learned at home that only Methodists can 
hope to be saved, has as her chum Margaret, 
an Episcopalian, and the association is good 
for each of them. I^ocal prej udice is destroyed 
and individual tolerance takes its place. 

For this and many other reasons, college 
life is likely to take the self-conceit out of 
a man. It discourages, sometimes rudely, 
the desire to make one's self conspicuous. 
Pedantic little men boast of their No. i 
teacher's certificates, and delight in asking 
hard questions in mathematics, grammar, 
or history, in order to parade their little 
learning, but the truly educated man knows 
that these things are not the test. ' ' The 
high - school graduate shrinks more from 
putting on the overalls of apprenticeship 
than the bachelor of arts. ' ' 
43 



(Boing fo ^ffege. 

President Jordan tells us that the college 
intensifies the individuality of a man; "it 
takes his best abilities and raises them to 
the second, or third, or tenth power, as we 
say in algebra." This is especially true, I 
think, in the modern elective system by 
w^hich one has an opportunity to pursue the 
line of work to which his natural powers 
and tastes lead him. For Dr. Jordan wisely 
says that the world turns aside to let any 
man pass who knows whither he is going. 
And he quotes the old traveler, Rafinesque, 
who says that when he was a boy he read 
the voyages of Captain Cooke, and Pallas, 
and lycVaillant, and his soul was fired with 
the desire to be a great traveler like them. 
" And so I became such," he adds tersely. 
Any young man with good health and good 
brain can accomplish almost any one thing 
which he determines to do. ' * Let him but 
saj' the word, and never unsay it!" 

The best place in the world to learn to 
say that word is among enthusiastic young 
men and young women. Ambition and 
enthusiasm are the levers that overturn the 
world. It is a good thing, as Thoreau 
44 



(Botng fo Coffege. 



says, for the youth to get together his 
material to build a bridge to the moon or a 
palace or a temple on the earth. It may, 
indeed, turn out to be only a woodshed, 
but, again quoting Dr. Jordan, ' ' I know 
many a man who in early life planned only 
to build a woodshed, but who found later 
that he had the strength to build a temple, 
if he only had the materials. ' ' 

Another advantage of college life which 
I desire to present as forcibly as I know 
how is this, that young men are in better 
company morally in college than out of 
college. Some young men in every college 
are wild and some are even vicious, but, 
with President Thwing, " I do believe, and 
believe upon evidence, that the morals of 
the American college student are cleaner 
than the morals of the young man in the 
office or behind the counter or in the shop. 
His life and associations belong to the realm 
of the intellect, not the realm of the appe- 
tite." Judging from the students in the 
university with which I am best acquainted, 
I do not hesitate to say that no equal num- 
ber of young men in business life, or ' ' run- 
45 



<Botn0 fo CoKtQt. 



ning at large," can present as high moral 
average. And ' ' the college presents a con- 
dition safer, far safer, for the holding and 
developing of a Christian faith than the 
office, the shop, the factory, the board of 
trade. Intelligence is more pious than 
ignorance, and the college is the place of 
intelligence. Associations are more pure in 
the college than in any place where men 
most do congregate." 

President Bradley, of Illinois College, 
says: ' ' Tested by any method, the average 
young man or woman in college is better 
and safer than the average young man or 
woman out of college. From the day she 
receives them, shy and home-sick boys and 
girls, till she sends them forth liberally 
educated men and women, the college exerts 
a beneficent influence upon her students. 
Every one who is familiar with student life 
in the better class of American colleges 
will, without hesitation, affirm that higher 
standards and ideals prevail in them than 
are found in almost any other communities, 
and that these ideals are improved and more 
and more fully realized as students advance 



(Boing io C^offege. 



from class to class. Every good college 
succeeds in arousing new intellectual life, 
new interest, new convictions of right, new 
loyalty to the truth, among her students 
from year to year. The highest class will 
often present a marked contrast to the lowest 
class in these respects. ' ' 

President Eliot, of Harvard, says : * ' I^et 
no one imagine that a young man is in 
peculiar moral danger at an active and in- 
teresting university. Far from it. Such a 
university is the safest place in the world 
for young men who have anything in them — 
far safer than counting-room, shop, factory, 
farm, barrack, forecastle, or ranch. The 
student lives in a bracing atmosphere; 
books engage him; good companionships 
invite him; good occupations defend him; 
helpful friends surround him; pure ideals 
are held up before him; ambition spurs 
him; honor beckons him." 

It is unfortunate that the public judges 
the whole student body, sometimes, by what 
Chancellor Holland calls the ' ' vealy ' ' con- 
duct of a few rowdies and imbeciles. More- 
over, the college is not intended as a sub- 
47 



(Boing fo ^D^ege. 



stitute for the reformatory, or an asylum 
for the feeble-minded. 

And so the association with fellow-students 
is one of the greatest benefits of college life. 
Edward Everett Hale even gives to it the 
highest place, when he says that * ' the good 
of a college is not in the things which it 
teaches. The good of a college is to be had 
from the fellows who are there and your 
associations with them. I do not belive 
that any life outside of a college has been 
found that will in general do so much for a 
man in helping him for this business of 
living. I could get more information out 
of 'Chambers' Encyclopaedia,' which you 
can buy for ten dollars, than any man will 
acquire as facts, by spending four years in 
any college. But the business of changing 
a boy into a man, or, if you please, chang- 
ing an unlicked cub into a well-trained gen- 
tleman, is, on the whole, more simply and 
certainly done in a good college than any- 
where else." 

The value of the college is, therefore, 
greatest in different ways to different peo- 
ple. An eminent educator summarizes them 
48 



(Botng io Coffege. 



as follows: The discipline of the regular 
studies; the inspiration of friendship; the 
enrichment of general reading; the culture 
of association with men of culture and of 
scholarly atmosphere ; special private read- 
ing; literary societies. 

Not long ago a distinguished college pres- 
ident wrote to fifty representative men to 
find out what was the best thing their col- 
lege course had done for them. From the 
answers of these representative men the 
prospective college student may learn that 
college life means infinitely more than so 
much lyatin, so much Greek, so much this, 
and so much that. Hamilton W. Mabie 
said that the college taught him how to 
study, and confirmed his habit of reading. 
"The greatest thing it can do for a stu- 
dent," he says, "is to confirm his highest 
thought of life, and to fix in him those 
habits which will enable him to realize that 
thought for himself when he gets out from 
under college influence." Dr. Parkhurst 
said that one great teacher in his college 
had done more for him than all other influ- 
ences. Professor Simon Newcomb said that 
49 



(Botns io (Coffege. 



the greatest service of the college to him 
was in bringing him into contact with edu- 
cated men and offering him the appliances 
necessary to promote his studies. Dr. 
Richard S. Storrs thought that the best 
thing he found in college life was the inti- 
mate contact with fine minds of classmates. 
The moral impulse to laborious lives was 
probably ihe best thing we got from col- 
lege," said President Angell. President 
Jordan said that the best thing a college, as 
a rule, does for a young man is to bring 
him into contact with and under the in- 
spiration of other men of a higher type 
than he is otherwise likely to meet. Dr. 
William Hayes Ward put it in this way: 
' ' The best thing I received was the encour- 
agement and help that came from good fel- 
lowship." President E. Benjamin Andrews 
said: "The college gave me the ability to 
work with intensity at any given time, 
whether with mind or with body, and also 
the ability on occasion to keep up maxi- 
mum occupation for a maximum time. I 
count this power for hard work among the 
very best results of a liberal education." 
50 



(Boins io ^ffege. 



Other answers are similar to these, and 
their editor draws the inference that "the 
best thing which the American college does 
for its graduates is in giving a training 
which is itself largely derived from per- 
sonal relationship." The college student 
is a member of a group, and feels, as a re- 
cent writer says, an increased motive to 
activity from the effect it has on his emo- 
tions, and this association gives him an in- 
creased power of accomplishing what he 
wants to do. 

Alice Freeman Palmer, formerly presi- 
dent of Wellesley, believes that one of the 
advantages of sending a girl to college is 
that she may have a * ' good time. ' ' * ' There 
is no other place where between eighteen and 
twenty-two she is so likely to have a genu- 
ine good time. Merely for good times, for 
romance, for society, college life offers un- 
equaled opportunities. Of course, no idle 
person can possibly be happy for a day, nor 
she who makes a business of trying to 
amuse herself," 

Other reasons given by Mrs. Palmer are: 
( I ) That the statistics in this country and 
51 



(Bomg io ^fPege. 



in England show that the standard of 
health is higher among the women who 
hold college degrees than among any other 
equal number of the same age and class; 
(2) ideals of personal character; (3) per- 
manent interests in life; (4) large capacity 
for usefulness in the world; adding: "If 
civilization pays, if education is not a mis- 
take, if hearts and brains and souls are 
more than the dress they wear, then by 
every interest dear to a Christian republic, 
by all the hope we have of building finer 
characters than former generations have 
produced, give the girls the widest and the 
highest and the deepest education we have 
dreamed of, and then regret that it is not 
better, broader, deeper," 

College life is valuable further in this, 
that it raises a thousand questions which it 
leaves unanswered. Many of them, most 
of them, will be answered in later years, but 
the raising of them is the great thing. It 
is the difference between a running stream 
and a stagnant, festering pond. 

Again: "The college may never make 
geniuses out of mediocrity; but it is no 
52 



<Boin0 io ^ffege. 



small or worthless achievement to enable 
mediocrity to appreciate and make use of 
the fruits of genius. ' ' And this I count as 
one of the great gifts of education. It 
gives to even the dullest among us " a sort 
of chart of the world's great work." 

I should at least mention the fact that an 
important feature of many colleges and 
universities is the military department, in 
charge of a United States army officer, and 
open to young men of proper age, usually 
1 6 to 21. The cadet corps does not inter- 
fere with the college studies, and the drill 
is good mentally and physically for almost 
every boy. It teaches neatness, prompt- 
ness, alertness, accuracy, and a spirit of 
obedience to established authority. 

The well-equipped gymnasium, now con- 
nected with every good college, is another 
means of benefit, both to young men and 
young women. Gymnasium training, un- 
der a competent instructor, is usually com- 
pulsory with members of the lower classes, 
and sound bodies are fitted to be the homes 
of sound minds. 

To these reasons should be added the ad- 
53 



(Botng fo it^tts^. 



vantages of the college literary societies and 
libraries. In the admirable ' ' How I Was 
Educated ' ' papers in The Forum, more than 
one writer says that the literary societies 
were of immense value in teaching him to 
think, to write, to investigate, and to speak, 
and in teaching him parliamentary usages, 
and how to take care of himself in par- 
liamentary tangles. Many a great public 
speaker has won his spurs in the college 
literary society, and many a successful states- 
man has had his first training in political 
combat at the same forum. In most col- 
leges and universities there are also scien- 
tific societies, organizations of students of 
various departments, and other student so- 
cieties of a similar character, which add 
greatly to their social and intellectual life. 
Dr. B. G. Robinson, formerly President of 
Brown University, says: " In direct educa- 
tion for the real work of life, no influences 
of my college days were equal to those of 
the debating society. It called into use and 
fastened in my memory what I learned from 
text-books and in lecture-rooms; it prompted 
to inquiries and investigations that other- 
54 



(SoCns io ^ofPege. 



wise would never have been made; it stim- 
ulated to the exercise of all my intellectual 
faculties as the set tasks of professors never 
could. ' ' 

To the young man or young woman who 
has access to only a few books, but who has 
a taste for good reading, the college library 
offers an inestimable advantage. Thousands 
of country boys and girls can appreciate the 
statement of President Angell, when he 
says, in telling how he was educated: "To 
us country boys, as we entered upon college 
life, nothing was more fascinating and more 
novel and more helpful than the access to 
well-furnished libraries. The boys who are 
reared in the neighborhood of libraries can 
have no appreciation of the sensation which 
we country lads, whose supply of books had 
been the most meager imaginable, but whose 
thirst for reading was insatiable, experi- 
enced in being ushered into a large library 
and told that all these books were now at 
our service." 

It is easy to point out, of course, men and 
women of great eminence and usefulness 
who never attended college. The names of 
55 



(Boing io CoCfege. 

Franklin and Lincoln are mentioned, and 
the question is asked, has the college any 
greater names than these? But, as Theo- 
dore Parker says, there will always be men 
whom nothing can keep uneducated; ' ' men 
that go forth strong as the sun, and as lonely. 
Shut out from books and teachers, they 
have instructors in the birds and beasts, and 
whole Vatican libraries in the trees and 
stones." But are you a Franklin or a Lin- 
coln ? If so, you can get along without the 
training of the schools. 

Bishop John H. Vincent is often pointed 
out as a man who has rendered services of 
the highest sort to the world, but who never 
went to college. His own testimony ought 
to be worth something. He speaks of it, as 
he says, with grief, regret, disappointment, 
and mortification. * ' It has been my thorn 
in the flesh, and I feel the sting of it in the 
society of college men. By voice, by pen, 
by example in the ordering of my own son's 
education, and by the Chautauqua service, 
I have for many years devoted my energies 
to the cause of higher education; and I 
make this statement concerning m^"- rela- 
56 



(Boing io ^ofPege. 



tion to the college to place myself with the 
advocates of liberal culture as against the 
mistaken and mercenary theory of the util- 
itarian, and thus I make humble protest 
against the pitiable vanity of those self- 
educated men who, not content with making 
boast of personal achievement, deprecate 
educational advantages which they failed 
to secure. ' ' 



III. 

Opinions of the Great Educators. 

THE American college is organized for 
young men and young women of aver- 
age abilities, and not for fools or 
geniuses. In order that my readers may 
have the benefit of the most eminent opin- 
ions, I have sought answers from the most 
distinguished American college presidents 
and other great educators. The following 
may be taken, therefore, as the chief rea- 
sons of the chief educators why young men 
and young women of average ability should 
secure a college course. They were first 
used in an address before an educational 
association, and I take the liberty of using 
them here, hoping that the words of these 
great educators may inspire young men and 
young women to the highest ideals of edu- 
cation and life. 

They were received in answer to this 

question: What, in your opinion^ is the chief 

reason why a young man or young woman of 

average ability should take a college course? 

58 



(Boing io Co((t^. 

Wii^LiAM T. Harris, United States Com- 
missioner of Education — Because a college 
course gives a survey of human knowledge 
■presented in the light of the unity of all 
knowledge. Secondary education in high 
schools and academies does not do this. Ele- 
mentary education in the common schools 
still less does this. The secondary and elemen- 
tary education give fragmentary knowledge, 
as compared with the college, and the young 
man of average intellect is made a balanced 
mind as compared with one who has only 
the elementary course of instruction. The 
latter is prone to be carried away by hob- 
bies. Some particular branch gets between 
him and the sun of all knowledge. Taking 
the youth at the epoch when he begins to 
inquire for a first principle as a guide to his 
practical decisions, the college gives him a 
compend of human experience. It shows 
him the verdict of the earliest and latest 
great thinkers upon the meaning of the 
world. It gives him the net result of 
human opinion as to the trend of history. 
It gathers into one focus the results of the 
vast labors of specialists in natural science, 
59 



(Botng fo ^cSfes^. 



in history, jurisprudence, philology, politi- 
cal science, and moral philosophy. If the 
college graduate is not acquainted with 
more than the elements of these multi- 
farious branches of human learning, yet he 
is all the more impressed by their bearing 
upon the conduct of life. He sees their 
function in the totality, although he may 
not be an expert in the methods of investi- 
gation in any one of them. 

Charles W. Eliot, President of Har- 
vard University — In order that the young 
man may discover what his powers are, and 
learn to use them for his own good and the 
good of others. 

Timothy Dwight, President^ of Yale 
University — In my judgment, the funda- 
mental reason why a young man should 
desire and take a college education is this — 
that such an education is the best means of 
developing thought-power in a young man, 
and making him a thinking man of cultured 
mind. 

Francis J. Patton, President of Prince- 
ton University — The strongest reason why 
a young man should take a college course 



(Botng fo ^fPege. 

is this — that he should have a higher aim 
in life than mere money-getting or so- 
called success — that a man should try to 
make the most of himself — that he should 
aim at his highest self-realization. No- 
where has a man such opportunities for 
broadening himself as in a college. 

Jacob Gould Schurman, President of 
Cornell University — The answer is, because 
so much of education will make a bigger 
man of him. It will act on his average in- 
tellect like fertilizer on a field of average 
fertility. It will make his mind more active, 
his capacity for learning and understanding 
larger; his judgment of men and the larger 
poHtical and social movements of mankind 
sounder and saner. In a word, a college 
education will at once train and stimulate 
his faculties, and supply him with a broader 
basis of knowledge to live upon. It makes 
more of a man of him. This is the chief 
value of all education. But incidentally, 
as it builds him up and makes him a stronger 
man intellectually, it fits him to do more for 
the community in which he lives, and to 
earn more for himself. 
61 



(Boins io CoKt^e. 



Austin Scott, President of Rutgers Col- 
lege — If the young man "of average intel- 
lect" is sincere in purpose and faithful in 
effort, the college training will fit him in 
mind and soul for greater usefulness among 
his fellow-men, and will give him a larger 
and finer standard with which to test the 
questions of life — personal, political, social, 
and ethical — which will come to him for 
discussion, 

Francis W. Parker, Principal of Chi- 
cago Normal School — The only reason why 
a young man should take a college course, 
or why he should be educated anywhere, is 
that he can do more good in the world if he 
is truly educated. As I understand it, that 
is what we are here for — to do all the good 
we can — and we therefore should prepare 
ourselves by doing good every day. 

F, M. McMuRRY, Teachers College, Co- 
lumbia University — It seems to me the larg- 
est purpose of a college course should be to 
develop permanent interests in the most im- 
portant fields of thought; so that, in conse- 
quence, one may be energetic and active- 
minded in those fields, thus securing a high 
62 



(Boing fo ^ffege. 

degree of happiness for himself, at the same 
time working for the benefit of others. 

E. A. WiNSHip, Editor Journal of Edu- 
cation, Boston — I think the college course 
is now needed by all j^outh who aspire to 
leadership in any lines of professional, com- 
mercial, mercantile, industrial, or public life 
as never before, because one must now com- 
pete with men of widest scholarship and 
training. It is certain that in every avenue 
of competition one must face elaborately- 
trained and educated men and women. A 
boy who played old-fashioned baseball would 
stand as good a chance in a modern football 
game under the new rules of the game as a 
' ' smart ' ' man untrained will in the near fu- 
ture in any line of public activity. What 
will a man or woman of the future do who 
can not understand French, German, Span- 
ish, or Italian; who can not understand the 
technical terms in electricity and other sci- 
ences, such as he can have at command if 
he has had a college training? Twenty 
years ago there were few who specialized in 
post-graduate work; to-day as many do this 
as used to take a first-class college course. 
63 



(Bo(n«( fo Coffege. 



A youth with a college course has no better 
education relatively than the graduate of a 
good common school five or ten years ago. 
J. W. Tayi^or, President of Vassar Col- 
lege — I should educate the young man or 
young woman of average ability, because I 
believe that a thorough training is the best 
preparation for any line of life to which one 
may be called; because I think that the im- 
pressions and ideals gained in these early 
years of life have the utmost influence upon 
all the coming years; because the sources of 
culture which are thus open to the soul are 
sure to prove a stimulus and a comfort what- 
ever may come after; because the fuller and 
larger you can make a life in these early 
years, the better it must be for all the fu- 
ture. I should not distinguish in any way 
at this point between the young man and 
the young woman, unless to say that if you 
must choose between the two, the 5^oung 
woman ought to have the larger opportun- 
ity, because the young man, through the 
very activities of his life and the larger re- 
lations in which he is likely to be thrown, 
will gain more opportunities for that educa- 
64 



(Boing fo Coffege. 



tion which life brings to every intelligent 
man or woman. 

Thomas J. Conaty, Rector of the Cath- 
olic University of America — I. If the 
shortest possible answer to this question is 
desired, I would say, in one word. Disci- 
pline. 

II. If further explanation is in order, I 
should observe: 

1 . The question seems to take for granted 
that there are various ' ' reasons, ' ' but asks 
for the chief reason only. A chief reason 
may be one that has more force than any 
other, or it may be one that includes and 
summarizes all others. It is better to adopt 
the latter meaning, since college experience 
is highly complex, and its effects on the 
student result from many inseparable ele- 
ments. 

2. The words "of average ability" sug- 
gest that the young man in question has no 
decided talent for any particular line of 
life — literary, professional, or commercial; 
he is "fairly bright," and wants to know 
what the best thing is that he can get at col- 
lege. Under these circumstances I should 

65 



(Botng io ^ofPege. 



say: (a) College training shows a man 
what his talent is, and even if that talent 
be for "business," its development is fur- 
thered, not hindered, by college experience. 
The delay of three or four years, during 
which a man "might be at work," is more 
than compensated for by the broadening and 
balancing which makes the "business man" 
a man in the highest sense, and enables 
him to meet the responsibilities — personal, 
social, and political — which success in busi- 
ness inevitably brings. (3) Whatever else 
is undecided, it is certain that the 5'oung 
man is to be a citizen. Fitness for citizen- 
ship, especially in a democracy, implies dis- 
cipline. A disciplined spirit means self- 
control, respect for the views and rights of 
others, the power of discerning between 
sham and reality in what we call ' ' national 
greatness." Such discipline is what the 
college offers. (<:) For the broader citi- 
zenship of the world, which Americans so 
sadly need, the college prepares a man by 
enabling him to appreciate what is great 
and good in other nations, to judge of the 
past with more calmness, and to gauge the 
future with more sureness. 



(Boing io ^ffege. 



III. If an answer be desired that will in- 
dicate briefly these various points of view, 
I should say: The chief reason why a 
young man of average ability should take 
a college course is that he may receive, un- 
der the most favorable circumstances, a 
thorough discipline of mind and will, which 
shall afford a better knowledge of himself 
and his fellow-men, and thereby make his 
own life fuller for humanity. 

Andrew D. White, formerly President 
of Cor7iell University^ now United States 
Ambassador to Germany — You ask the 
chief reason why a young man or young 
woman of average ability should take a 
college course. I should say that such 
reason is to be found in the duty of every 
man and woman to develop his or her best 
powers as far as circumstances permit. Of 
course, I could enlarge on this thesis to any 
extent and add vast numbers of special 
reasons, but the above seems to me the 
only answer to your question for which I 
have time. 

Charles F. Thwing, President of West- 
ern Reserve University — In my opinion, 
67 



(Boins io Coffege. 



the strongest reason urging a man to take a 
college course is the enlarging and enrich- 
ment of character. 

D. C. GiivMAN, President of Johns Hop- 
kins University — A strong desire for dis- 
cipline and knowledge would be a strong 
reason for encouraging a young man to go 
to college. 

Nathaniei< Butler, President of Colby 
College — It has been well said that an 
educated man has a sharp axe in his hand, 
and an uneducated man a dull axe. I 
should say that the purpose of a college 
course is to sharpen the axe to its keenest 
edge. The value of the college course, in 
my judgment, is to be found, not chiefly in 
what the graduate knows, but in what he 
is and can learn to do. The ideal function 
of the college is to put the student in the 
way of making the utmost of himself. 

Henry Wade Rogers, Presideiit of 
Northwestern University — My answer is 
that it enables him to make the most of him- 
self and multiplies a hundred fold his 
chances of success. 

A. S. Draper, President of the Univer- 
68 



(Botng io CoKt^t. 

sity of Illinois — The greatest reason why a 
young man of average intellect should take 
a college course, is to the end that he may 
be safely aggressive among educated people 
and become fitted for leadership in affairs. 

H. M. MacCrackkn, Chancellor of New 
York University — The chief reason why a 
young man, even if possessed of but average 
intellect, should take a college course, if 
the way opens to him, is that if he do his 
work faithfully he will possess a better dis- 
ciplined mind for whatever work of life he 
may turn his attention to, whether artisan, 
farmer, physician, or what not. 

M. W. Stryker, President of Hamilton 
College — The strongest reason why "the 
average young man" should, if possible, 
take a college course is, that rightly taken 
it will make him far more than an average 
man in intellectual sympathies, in mental 
horizon, and in practical effectiveness. 

James H. Caneiei^d, Presideiit of Ohio 
State University — In my opinion, the 
strongest reason why a young man of aver- 
age intellect should take a college course is 
that it tends so readily and so immediately 



(Botng fo ^ffege. 



to put him in possession of his faculties 
and powers, to give him a wider and a 
broader horizon, to make him more thor- 
oughly master of himself, and above all to 
enable him to stand outside of himself and 
see himself in his true proportions and true 
relations to the world. 

Chari^ES a. Schaeffer, late President 
of the State University of Iowa ^— I believe 
that the young man of average intellect 
should take a college course, because ' ' the 
pen is mightier than the sword," and the 
history of the world's progress is the record 
of the triumph of the educated mind over 
matter. 

R. H. Jesse, President of the University 
of the State of Missouri — It is estimated 
that of all the young men that have gradu- 
ated in this country from colleges, one out 
of every forty has reached honorable dis- 
tinction, while of those who have not 
graduated from colleges, only one in ten 
thousand has reached distinction. Colleges 
are not meant for men of phenomenal gen- 
ius, nor for idiots, but for those who come 
between these extremes. It is the best in- 
70 



<Bo(ns fo €k)ff'ege. 



stitution that the will of man has yet in- 
vented for securing to young men of aver- 
age ability success mentally, morally, physi- 
cally, and financially in life. 

William L. Wilson, President of Wash- 
ington and Lee University — You ask me to 
tell you "What, in my opinion, is the chief 
reason why a j^^oung man of average intel- 
lect should take a college course." Per- 
haps the sententious answer would be, just 
because he is of average intellect. Ex- 
traordinary intellect, which is exceptional, 
may win success and power by its own 
strength and impulse. The great mass of 
young men develop character and mental 
force, and gather knowledge by the meth- 
ods, aids, and discipline, which human 
wisdom has, through centuries of experi- 
ence, slowly perfected and shaped. Those 
methods are to-day embodied in the in- 
struction of our best colleges, and, thanks 
to private endowment or to State aid, can 
be availed of at a very small fraction of 
their cost. Education, in the college sense 
of the word, was never so essential to social 
position and to effective work in mechanical 
71 



<Botn0 fo ^ofPege. 



or professional occupations as it is to-day. 
It lifts men to a higher plane in society, 
while it fits them for higher and better-paid 
service. Its ends are (i) the building up 
of sound moral character; (2) the acquisi- 
tion of thorough mastery over mind and 
body, so that the powers of either may be 
directed at will to the accomplishment of 
needful and difhcult tasks; and (3) the 
accumulation of knowledge, which includes 
not only results, but acquaintance with the 
best methods of reaching results. 

W. H. Payne, Chancellor of the Univer- 
sity of Nashville — Why should young men 
go to college? For the same reason that 
crude ores should be assayed — to discover 
and determine their qualities, to ascertain 
what they are good for, to make them mar- 
ketable and useful. The world is full of 
misfits and failures, and very many of these 
cases are due to the fact that men choose 
their vocations before their several tastes 
and abilities have been developed and as- 
certained by discipline and study. There 
is many a man at the plow who would do 
the world a royal service in the pulpit or at 
72 



<Botns fo Co^tat. 



the bar; and many a man is making a vain 
attempt at preaching or pleading whose 
natural vocation is that of an artisan. The 
early choice of a vocation, before the nat- 
ural aptitudes have been brought to light 
by systematic study, is a profound mistake. 
All education should first be of the liberal 
type, simply humane, addressed to the man 
as a whole, and designed to develop the 
potential into the actual. After that, it 
may be technical, addressed to man as an 
instrument, and fitting him for the special 
vocation to which he is called by his real 
tastes and powers. It is every man's duty, 
as a preparation for complete living, to sum 
up in himself, so far as study will enable 
him to do it, the msdom and virtue of the 
generations that have preceded him, and to 
this end, the opportunities offered by a good 
college are a necessity. 

Chas. C. Harrison, Provost of the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania — A college course 
represents the most effective, and in ex- 
penditure of time, money, and energy, the 
most economical method of securing the 
knowledge and mental discipline which are 
73 



<Boins io €bffesc. 



essential, in this age, to the highest success 
in business, professional, or social life. I^arge 
measures of such success are attained by- 
men who have had no such training. But 
it is safe to say that with such advantages, 
the same energy and ability would have 
reached a still higher point. 

WiLWAM Rainey Harper, President of 
the University of Chicago — I would say that 
a young man or young woman of average 
ability, in these days, should take a college 
course, if practicable, for the reason that 
the advance of world knowledge is so wide- 
spread that, in order to hold one's own, to 
be the best, and do the best, it is necessary 
to get just as much education as possible. 
Under the same relative conditions, a young 
man needs the higher education who would 
not have needed it two generations since. 

Martin Keli^ogg, President of the Uni- 
versity of California — If all conditions are 
favorable, it can hardly be doubted, First, 
that one should acquire knowledge and men- 
tal growth so far as it is practicable; and 
Second, that this can best be done in a com- 
munity of students, under the guidance of 
74 



(Botns io ^CofPege. 



skilled teachers, and with the advantages of 
good libraries, laboratories, etc. 

James B. Angell, President of the Uni- 
versity of Michigan — The chief reason why- 
one should take a college course is to make 
him more of a man. 

Charles Eliot Norton, Professor of 
the History of Art in Harvard University — 
The end of education is to enable a man to 
make the best of himself; all other ends are 
included in this. A well-chosen course of 
study in college affords him opportunities of 
self- culture which he is not likely otherwise 
to obtain. 

■ Richard G. Boone, President of the State 
Normal College of Michigan — (i) If by a 
college education is meant scholarship only 
or chiefly, its utility to a man of average 
ability may be questioned. The knowledge 
might have little application to the career 
such a man would follow. (2) The first 
value of a course in college to any man, of 
whatever ability, is the broadening of his 
own life through multiplying its opportuni- 
ties for living on higher planes. (3) A 
high value of such a course is the increased 
75 



(Botng fo Coffege. 



effectiveness which accompanies all real ed- 
ucation. One young man in ever}^ 200 in 
this country is college bred. But of all the 
highest offices in church and state for 150 
years, 58 per cent, or 116 in every 200, are 
held by college-bred men. (4) The man of 
first-rate powers might succeed fairly with- 
out such institutional aids; but the man of 
average ability only needs every such rein- 
forcement he can use. 

CharIvKS W. Dabney, Jr. , President of 
the University of Tennessee — Every young 
person should take a college course for the 
sake of the liberal education it gives; but 
the young person of moderate ability needs 
this course most of all. Young persons of 
special talents will be greatly improved and 
rounded out by a liberal education. If 
they do not take it, they become more and 
more one-sided the older they grow. But 
such persons are apt to be happy with their 
hobbies and successful, in a way, even with- 
out a college course. It is the young men 
and young women of average ability, pos- 
sessing good common sense and industry, 
who are most improved by a college course, 
76 



(Boing (o Cofftge. 



and make the happiest and most useful citi- 
zens in the end. Persons of average ability 
are the best material in the world to make 
good, useful citizens out of. The greatest 
geniuses are the people who have the genius 
for work. Again, such young persons 
should take a college course because it is 
the only way to qualify themselves to climb 
up out of the monotonous, dead-sea-level 
of mediocre humanity. Such people, with- 
out a liberal education, form the great army 
of our industrial or commercial slaves. 
They are the ' ' hewers of wood and drawers 
of water" for the capitalists or the cap- 
tains - general of the professions and of 
trade. They make our great body of clerks, 
book-keepers, agents, and drummers — use- 
ful and oftentimes happy men and women, 
but tied down to humble careers for the 
want of a liberal education. Thirdly, 
young men of average ability should go to 
college because they can there best develop 
and strengthen their God-given powers. A 
college education is the only true prepara- 
tion for a worthy life. The culture and 
discipline of the college aim to develop all 
77 



(Botng io ^o^ege. 



the powers of the intellect, heart, and body, 
truly and equally. As Huxley says: "That 
man has had a liberal education whose body 
has been so trained in youth that it is the 
ready servant of his will, and does with 
ease and pleasure all that, as a mechanism, 
it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, 
cold, logic engine, with all of its parts of 
equal strength and in smooth running order, 
ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to 
any kind of work and to spin the gossamers, 
as well as forge the anchors, of the mind; 
whose mind is stored with the knowledge 
of the great fundamental truths of nature 
and of the laws of her operations; one 
who — no stunted ascetic — is full of life and 
fire, but whose passions have been trained 
to come to heel by a vigorous will, the 
servant of a tender conscience; one who 
has learned to love all beauty, whether of 
nature or of art, to hate all vileness and to 
esteem others as himself." The true col- 
lege aims to make a man of this type. 
Every boy and girl, should strive, first of 
all, to get this liberal education, and make 
it the foundation of their professional, 
technical or business training. 
78 



(Botng fo ^fPese. 



J. H. KiRKi^AND, Chancellor of Vander- 
bilt University — I consider a college educa- 
tion the very best preparation that a young 
man of average ability can have for life. 
This is, I think, shown by all the experi- 
ence of the past. 

Charlss Kendali, Adams, President of 
the University of Wisconsin — In a general 
way, I should say that the chief reason why 
a young man of average ability should take 
a college course, is that he may know more, 
and consequently better do the work of 
life. In addition to this, he forms an 
acquaintance with men, how to deal with 
them, and is for that reason also more likely 
to succeed than he would be without such 
an education. 

B. Benjamin Andrews, Superintendent 
of the Chicago Public Schools, and formerly 
President of Brown University — (i) To 
add to the proper and legitimate enjoyment 
of life. (2) To develop his or her powers. 
(3) To make him or her more useful in 
Hfe. 

lyESTER F. Ward, Curator Department 
of Fossil Plants, Smithsonian Institution — 
79 



(Boincf fo Coffege. 



There are so many reasons why a young 
man should take a college course, if he can, 
that I could scarcely enumerate them. A 
college course ought to mean a good educa- 
tion; and as matters are now, a man with 
an education stands about ten chances of 
success where a man without an education 
has one chance. So much for the practical 
side. But this ought not to be the chief 
argument. Knowledge is valuable for its 
own sake, and well worth the effort and 
sacrifice in getting it. There is no use try- 
ing to elaborate this idea. It is a truism, 
and yet I have written three books chiefly 
to show the use of knowledge. 

D. B. PuRiNTON, President of Denison 
University — I should say that a college 
course finds its chief justification in its 
power to develop personal character. Per- 
sonality is the distinguishing possession of 
man. But personality in the race is nothing 
more than the aggregate of individual per- 
sonalities. What these are, therefore, is of 
the utmost value, both to themselves and to 
the race. Intelligence and will are the 
essential elements of personality. These 



<Botn«[ fo Coffege. 



elements may be developed in various ways, 
but chiefly by the apprehension and appro- 
priation of truth. For this purpose all 
truths are valuable, but are not equally so. 
The college course in a good institution 
embodies an aggregation of such truths as, 
according to a consensus of opinion among 
wise men of all ages, have shown themselves 
specially conducive to the development of a 
pure and powerful personality. Such a 
course, therefore, offers the best available 
means of right self-development. He who 
would make the most and best of himself 
possible in this age cannot afford to neglect 
the advantages of college life. 

N1CH01.AS Murray ButIvER, Professor 
of Philosophy and Education in Columbia 
University — One conclusive reason why, in 
my judgment, a young man of average 
ability should take a college course is that 
he may have an opportunity to obtain an 
insight into the world's culture and the 
study of nature from that comparative and 
reflective point of view that is only possible 
to one who has come to the age at which a 
college course is usually entered upon, and 
81 



(Boing fo Coffege. 



by so doing may lay the basis for an intel- 
lectual enjoyment and development that 
will last through life, and make him a 
sharer in the realities of human achieve- 
ment and human experience, 

B. A. HiNSDALB, Professor of the Science 
and the Art of Teaching in the University 
of Michiga7i — It was once the fashion to 
state the end of education in terms of 
knowledge, then it became the fashion to 
state it in terms of development, power, or 
culture, and now it is common to state it in 
terms of society. Looking at your ques- 
tion from the first of these points of view, 
the answer would be, the young man or 
woman should go to college for the sake of 
acquiring knowledge or receiving instruc- 
tion. Answered from the second point of 
view, it would be, that he or she should go 
for the purpose of receiving the develop- 
ment or cultivation that the college pro- 
vides. In the third place, the answer 
would be, the young man or young woman 
should take a college course in order to re- 
ceive that preparation that he needs to fit 
him for his place in the world, or to adapt 



(Botng fo ^ffege. 



him to his material and spiritual environ- 
ment. Properly speaking, I do not regard 
these answers as exclusive, but rather as 
inclusive, one of another. I do not know 
that I have any particular choice, provided 
lam allowed to define "knowledge," "de- 
velopment," and "social functions and re- 
lations. ' ' 

Skth Low, President of Colu7nbia Uni- 
versity — Some of the advantages to be ex- 
pected from a college education are easily 
stated. Such an education ought to give a 
man perspective by enabling him to esti- 
mate the present in the light of the past. 
It ought to strengthen his mind by exercis- 
ing and disciplining his powers; and it 
ought to broaden his outlook by enabling 
him to know something, at least, of many 
branches of knowledge. In a word, it ought 
to make a man capable of filling a larger 
place in the world in any walk in life for 
which his talents fit him than he would fill 
without such an education. 

David Starr Jordan, President of Le- 
land Stanford fuiiior University — The 
whole of your life has been spent in your 



(Boing io ^Cfege. 



own company, and only the educated man 
is good company to himself. Only the man 
who is trained to help himself can be help- 
ful to others. 

B. P. Raymond, President of Wesley an 
University — First, because a college course 
will make the average man more to himself, 
more to his family, more to the State, the 
church, and the world. If there were 
nothing but material considerations — the 
making of money, it is quite possible that 
many men would make just as much 
money, or even more, without as with a 
college education; but there are so many 
other considerations and values that enter 
into life that it seems to me a great multi- 
tude of men of average intellect ought to 
take a college education. How much our 
age needs the man of finer culture and 
large views! They are needed in every 
town, church, and in every relationship of 
life. 

W. F. Warrkn, President of Boston 

University — In my opinion, the strongest 

reason why a man should desire to take a 

college course is, that in a well ordered 

84 



(Boing io CofPege. 



Christian college lie finds tlie most and best 
lielps in the line of accomplishing his 
divine calling as a deathless creature of 
God. 

Wli^LiAM E. BoGGS, Chancellor of the 
University of Georgia — In my opinion, the 
best reason for taking a college course is that 
more than anything else it will develop in 
their fullness and symmetry those powers 
which God has bestowed upon young men, 
and thus do more than any human device 
beside it can effect to make one a complete 
man. 

Franklin Carter, President of Williams 
College — A young man of average intellect 
should take a college course in order that 
he may, by increasing his power to render 
services to his fellow-men, also add to his 
own happiness. 

Gkorgk E. MacLean, Chancellor of the 
University of Nebraska — The primal rea- 
son, in my judgment, why a young man of 
average intellect should take a college course 
is that every one of us should make the 
most of himself, in order to do the utmost 
good to his fellow-men, and ultimately to be 



(Boing fo ^ofTege. 



fitted to glorify God by having the largest 
possible apprehension of Him and His uni- 
verse. 

Cyrus NorThrup, President of the Uni- 
versity of Minnesota — Under ordinary con- 
ditions a college course will make a man 
master of his own powers better than any 
other training, and will thus enable him to 
do more for himself and more for the world 
than he otherwise could. 

B. B. 'W'H.VX:'Ey formerly President of Pur- 
due University, and Ex-Superintendent of the 
Cincinnati Public Schools — There are many 
reasons for taking a college course, if a 
young person has the ability and can secure 
the necessary means. Such an education 
not only promotes his success in the work 
of life, whether industrial or professional, 
but it increases his influence for good in all 
the relations of life, and multiplies and en- 
nobles his enjoyments. Life is richer and 
more satisfactory to the educated man than 
to the uneducated. Bducation not only en- 
riches the common pleasures of life, but it 
opens up new sources of enjoyment, and 
this is increasingly true as civilization ad- 



(Bows fo €k)fPe3e. 



varices. Anything that makes human life 
richer and nobler possesses high value. It 
may be added, that success in all industrial 
and professional pursuits is increasingly de- 
manding special preparation, and the wider 
and higher the general education the more 
fruitful the special training. The young 
man who has a college education is prepared 
to make a choice of his occupation, and 
many doors are open to him. 

Iv. Ci^ARK SbeIvYK, President of Smith 
College — The chief reason why a young 
woman of average ability should take a 
college course is, to gain most surely and 
quickly the truest knowledge of herself and 
the world in which she lives, in order that 
she may become the perfect woman she was 
designed to be. 

W. E. Waters, President of Wells Col- 
lege — The reason w^hy a young woman of 
average ability should take a college course 
is no new one, and is substantially the same 
as when Mary Lyon interested herself in 
that labor out of which grew Holyoke Col- 
lege, and, indeed, the same as that v/hich 
led to the founding of men' s colleges, to wit: 
87 



(Botn0 fo Cc^ts^ 



to fit the student for conditions in life which 
she is to meet, in a way for which she will 
be held responsible. It is to train her im- 
pulses to act under intelligent guidance, to 
enable her to think her way out clearly in 
problems which it is coming to her lot to 
help in the solution of, and to make her 
sympathies go hand in hand with a well- 
balanced and intelligent and discerning way 
of looking at things. Many young women 
simply make a training school of their col- 
lege in order to go into teaching; even in 
that purpose they do not fail to reap the ad- 
vantages the college meant to give them, 
for women of our colleges make undoubt- 
edly the best female teachers. 

Merrii,!, B. Gates, formerly President 
of Amherst College — In these days of free 
schools and ample opportunities, the ques- 
tion is not, "Why should this young man 
go to college?" but, "Why should he not 
go to college?" The parent who can open 
the way for his son to secure a liberal edu- 
cation has no more right to decline to do so 
than he would have to tie the boy' s right 
arm fast to his side and let it wither, or to 



(Botn0 io ^{fege. 



refuse to give his son healthful nutriment. 
And the assertion that a young man can 
make more money by the time he is thirty 
if he goes into business at fifteen, than he 
can if he goes to college, is not a sufiicient 
reason for narrowing that young man' s life 
by the early arrest of the process of educa- 
tion. Suppose that a man of wealth were 
to make this offer to the father of a healthy 
boy of fourteen: "Strap your son's right 
arm to his side and keep it there till he is 
twenty-five years old, letting the arm wither, 
and I will give him ten thousand dollars — 
more than he could earn if he were to work 
steadily from now until he is twenty-five." 
With what indignation would the parent re- 
ject such an offer! Is the development of a 
young man's intellectual and moral powers 
a matter of less importance than the devel- 
opment of his bodily powers ? The experi- 
ence of life and the revealed teaching of 
God place a sublime emphasis upon the 
cultivation of the knowing powers, that a 
trained intelligence and quickened con- 
science may rightly direct the power of will 
in a man's life work. 



<Botns io ^ffege. 



George C. Chase, President of Bates 
College — In my judgment, "the chief rea- 
son why a young man of average abiHty 
should take a college course" is this: A 
college course is the most efEective means 
yet devised for aiding a young man to con- 
vert his best potential self into his actual 
self — for helping him to understand the 
true meaning of his own life and its relation 
to the world, and to express this meaning 
in his character, his plans, and his acts. 

John Henry Barrows, President of 
Oberlin College — I would say, in a word, 
that the chief reason why a young person 
of average ability should take a college 
course is that thereby he gets, in the best 
way, the possession of himself — his better, 
fuller, stronger self. He enlarges, at a 
time when his nature is elastic and unde- 
veloped, the bounds of his personal vitality. 

Agnes Irwin, Dean of Radcliffe College 
— The question you ask me, "What is the 
chief reason why a young woman of aver- 
age ability should take a college course?" 
is not difficult to answer from my point of 
view. The chief reason, to my mind, 
90 



(Boing io (J^ofPege. 



would be that the college course would 
make her more of a person — a better woman, 
morally, intellectually, socially, in the broad 
sense — and therefore better spiritually — 
better in every sense. If she were that 
rare thing, a born student, she could hardly 
hope to get out of college the good teaching 
and the intellectual companionship she could 
get in college; if she were compelled to 
earn her living, she would be well trained 
in college for that purpose; to many women 
college gives chances and opportunities they 
could not have had elsewhere. 



91 



IV. 

CONCIvUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER. 

WHEN all of the reasons have been 
considered, one thought stands above 
all the rest. The greatest good 
which can come into any human Uf e through 
this process of education is a personal rich- 
ness and beauty of life which can come in 
no other way. For a dollar you can buy a 
cyclopedia which contains more facts than 
you can learn in any course in any college. 
Some men are fortunate enough to make in 
a single speculation more money than a 
college president earns in years. Some 
women by accident of birth or riches move 
in society circles which are forever closed 
against the most cultivated and refined 
women who do not have these advantages 
of birth or fortune. A piece of machinery 
is more systematic and self-poised than the 
best disciplined mind in any school. The 
facts of history, mathematics, and Latin 
learned may be forgotten, but the supreme 



(Botng fo £:offese. 



gift of education — a larger, richer, and 
more beautiful life — will live forever. Not 
so much what he seems to the v^orld to 
be, but rather what the world and human 
life seem to him to be. Please notice this 
distinction. The failure to make it leads us 
to false views of the ends and purposes of 
education. It is a truth which, had I the 
eloquence, I would burn upon your hearts 
and minds so deep that the wash of the 
world through all the years could never 
wholly wear it away; this thought, that 
education is not to make us seem to be 
greater to the world, but that the world and 
all life and all eternity may seem greater 
and richer and more beautiful to us. 

Take two young men — one of them has 
money and his family is respected. He is 
learned only in the lore of neckties and 
cigarettes. He has no education beyond 
the lower grades of the common school, 
because he was the darling of his father and 
mother and did as he pleased. He can 
wear good clothes and spend money, and he 
is looked upon as a fortunate yoUng fellow. 
But what is his outlook upon life ? What 
93 



<Botn0 fo CofPege. 



can it be ? He may have put furniture into 
his house, but how poor and barren is the 
furniture of his mind ! How does this mar- 
velous and mysterious thing called life 
seem to him? Human life, deep as the 
ocean, awful as the wrath of God, sweet as 
His love, beautiful as a woman's face, fra- 
grant as a garden of lilies, rich with the 
gifts of countless ages, and wrapped about 
with the incense of sacrifices, millions upon 
millions, since man first rose far enough 
above the beast to deny himself for his 
brother. 

And the great book of nature — how can 
he read it? For he has not learned its 
alphabet. When he sees stratum upon 
stratum of rocks in these old hills, dipping 
and turning and twisting, but each layer 
keeping always its proper position, what 
story do they tell to him ? What story of 
the birth-throes of the world? When at 
night he sees the candles of heaven — does 
his mind, knowing something of their laws 
and their movements, follow them in their 
courses through infinite space? Can he 
comprehend the stars of the Milky Way, as 
.94 



(Boing io ^offege. 



thick as the flakes in a snow storm, and 
reahze that our world is one of them and 
that they are our neighbors? To the 
astronomer, the words infinite love, infinite 
patience, infinite peace, eternal life, have a 
larger and deeper meaning. His life is 
enriched and beautified thereby — for what- 
ever we think upon becomes a part of us. 

When this ignorant young man with the 
good clothes walks through the field, what 
story do the brier and the tree and the robin 
and the cattle on the hill tell to him ? Does 
he realize that they are his brothers — aye, 
his brothers, even to the thorn that tears 
his glove — brothers by a law which we do 
not fully understand, but which we feel to 
be true, a law which has worked through 
infinite ages in God's great school, shaping 
all things as they are, and making every- 
thing in the universe akin to everything 
else ? 

When he strolls into your court house 
and hears the judge hand down a decision, 
does he realize that the Romans centuries 
ago made that law, the English modified it, 
and the Americans use it? Or does he 
95 



(Boing io ^Cfege. 



think that a ward political convention 
thought it out? When he prates glibly of 
liberty do his thoughts go back to that 
little rocky country on the Mediterranean 
where the idea of "liberty" was first fully 
conceived? When he sees a piece of 
statuary, does he realize that the artists of 
that same old nation on the Mediterranean 
made that piece of statuary possible to-day ? 
When he goes to the theater to see ' ' Ham- 
let, ' ' is his mind flooded with light from the 
suns that rose in England in the glorious 
days of good Queen Bess, and all his life 
made brighter and richer because of the light 
that has come to him from those great orbs, 
or is the Melancholy Dane to him a lunatic 
indeed ? Having eyes he sees not, and hav- 
ing ears he hears not the great beauties and 
the great riches of the world. I repeat, he 
may seem to the world to be prosperous and 
fortunate, but that is not the question. The 
question is, what do the world and life seem 
to him ? 

Take the other young man. He may not 
have much money, but he has managed to 
enrich and beautify his life with a college 
96 



(Botng io Coff'e0C. 

course and much reading. Everything in 
the universe has a different meaning to him, 
though he may have forgotten most of the 
facts learned in college. His mind has been 
transformed by the thoughts which have 
passed through it. Why does the good 
housewife take the musty garment out of 
the wardrobe and hang it in the sweet May 
sunshine and the sweet May breeze ? Does 
she expect all of the sunshine and all of the 
breeze which fill its meshes to remain there 
forever? Nay, but because by the very act 
of passing through it the sunshine and the 
breeze sweeten and purify it. Even so, no 
one can study, for example, the old Greek 
language and literature and art without be- 
ing made better thereby, though he may for- 
get how to read the language itself, and 
forget the names of the marbles which Phi- 
dias wrought and the titles of the plays 
which Sophocles wrote. Their sunshine and 
their breeze have passed through his life. 
The same is true in some degree of the study 
of any high subject. 

The man or woman who lives the intel- 
lectual life, who has for his friends che phi- 
97 



<Boin0 fo Coffege. 



losophers and the sages, who sometimes 
climbs to the starlit heights with Athenian 
sage and Judean seer; who studies electric- 
ity, and thinks Edison's thoughts after him; 
who studies engineering, and sees how the 
laws of the universe are illustrated in the 
curve of a railroad track or the truss of a 
bridge; who studies geology, and sees that 
the trilobite or the fossil fern is a letter in 
the alphabet of God's great book of Nature; 
who studies music and poetry, and hears 
with his own ears the morning and evening 
stars singing together; who studies ethics, 
and sociology, and political economy, and 
learns that what every human being does 
affects every other human being in the 
world; who studies the science of religion, 
and learns that in every island of the sea, 
and in every corner of every continent, men 
and women build altars to the Divinity, and, 
"like children crying in the night," reach 
out trembling hands for help and guidance 
— such a one learns to look upon the world 
with other eyes, to hear with other ears, and 
to be moved by another heart. He may not 
appear to those about him any better off or 
98 _ . 



(Boina ^o ^^fPege. 



any more fortunate than the man who has 
not even heard that these things exist, but 
he is richer, he is more fortunate, a thou- 
sand fold. 

' ' Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle 
of Cathay ; ' ' better a year of culture, and 
knowledge, and love, than four score and 
ten of a life shut about by a high wall of 
ignorance and narrowness, into which the 
sunshine of an intellectual sympathy can 
not fall, and through which its breezes can 
not blow. 

You perceive that this is the true practi- 
cal education about which we hear so much. 
That which brings to its owner something 
of inestimable value is certainly of practical 
benefit. The firm faith of the dying servant 
of God is not a salable commodity, but that 
faith is of more value to him, more practi- 
cal value to him, than all the banks in his 
town. The richness and beauty and strength 
which all true education puts into life are 
not salable commodities. The raw and 
blatant world, which worships machinery 
and politics and sensationalism, would prob- 
ably not buy them if it could, but they 

99 
U. ifC- 



(Boing io ^ofPege. 



are of more real, practical value than any- 
thing else we have in this fair land. 

Bishop Potter says: ' ' The time will never 
come when a man who has not merely 
learned certain chemical combinations so 
that he can manufacture fertilizers, or cer- 
tain mathematical combinations so that he 
can build a railroad, but has also learned 
what made a little peninsula in the Adriatic 
the mistress of the world, or how Roman 
law became the basis of the jurisprudence 
of Christendom, or how the fall of empires 
was foreshadowed in the Republic of Plato, 
will not be in every highest sense the mas- 
ter of him who has not. He may not be as 
rich, as adroit, as aggressive, or apparently 
as successful. He may be overlooked or 
forgotten in the mad scramble for place or 
power, or in the vulgar contentions of polit- 
ical conventions. But sooner or later will 
come the moment when inferior men, help- 
less and groping in their ignorance, will be 
compelled to listen to him.' ' 

What then is the conclusion to be reached? 
If education — the right sort of education — 
makes us better men and women; happier, 
100 



(Botng io ^fPegc. 



broader, deeper, higher, and finer, and 
therefore capable of doing more good in 
the world, and capable of making others 
better, happier, broader, deeper, higher, 
and finer, we are driven to this conclusion: 
that it is as much our duty to be educated 
as it is to be honest. No man has any more 
right to deprive his children of education 
than he has to steal from them their daily 
bread. You will agree with me, I think, 
that we have no higher or diviner duty than 
to do good in the world. 

If, then, it is our chief business in the 
world to help our fellows, it is our chief 
duty to so equip ourselves that we can best 
serve them. The old and beautiful parable 
of the talents might find a fitting applica- 
tion here. He that burieth his talent is an 
unprofitable servant indeed, and there is no 
place for him except in outer darkness, cre- 
ated by himself. 

This view of the personal worth of edu- 
cation may seem to you selfish, but it is the 
very foundation of altruism. How can 
you feed your neighbor when your 
own barn is empty? How can you inspire 
101 



(Being fo CofPese. 



others when there is no fire on your own 
altar? How can you lend a helping hand 
when your own arm is not trained? I have 
put the good that the educated man can do 
to others as of secondary importance, for 
the plain reason that he must first have the 
good himself before he can give it to others. 

But the young man or the young woman 
says, ' ' Education is a good thing, of course, 
but I have no money.' ' What do you want 
with money, if you have youth and health? 
They are better than a national bank. 

Youth is the period when we own the 
world and the fullness thereof. Youth, 
like Napoleon, sees the world and proceeds 
to conquer it. Youth, that stands like 
John on the Isle of Patmos, and sees apoca- 
lypse after apocalypse. Youth, that sees 
mountains and dares to climb them, stone 
walls and dares to beat them down, chasms 
and dares to bridge them, fair ladies and 
dares to win them. Youth, that builds 
castles in the air and soars up to them on 
radiant wings. Youth, that here at the 
beginning of the twentieth century has all 
history and all lands for its demesne, though 
102 



<Botn0 fo fi^ofl'ese. 



it may live in a cottage or a cabin. It has 
for its birthright every discovery, every in- 
vention, every conquest, and every sacrijJce 
since the world began. Youth, for whom 
the cave-dwellers made their rude imple- 
ments of stone, as they groped their way in 
the dawn of human evolution. Youth, for 
whom Shakespeare wrote, for whom New- 
ton and Kepler and Edison solved the mys- 
teries of the world, and for whom the 
twentieth century is getting ready to open 
its golden gates of promise. The dynamic 
force that is wrapped up in a young life 
is immeasurable. The days are strings of 
pearls, the warm blood that flows through 
the veins is a stream of gold, and every 
opportunity that crowns the young life is a 
coronet of diamonds. 

The most sublime sight in the world is 
that of a young man or young woman 
fighting his way or her way up from the 
pit of ignorance to the sunlit heights; 
fighting in the teeth of what seems to be 
fate; fighting against poverty and heredity 
and environment; fighting destiny itself, 
beating it down inch by inch. Reading 
103 



(Boing (o ^offege. 



this little book there will be some who are 
making this fight for high ideals — a glori- 
ous fight, although everything in the world 
seems to be against them. In the midst of 
such struggles as these — battles which the 
historian never sees or hears — one might 
well crave the gift of eloquence to describe 
them. I can only bid you "look abroad 
and see to what fair countries you are 
bound. ' ' 



104 



Ulest Uirginia Utiivcrsify, 

MORGANTOWN, W. VA. 



Faculty of Fifty-four Professors and Instructors. 

More than Eight Hundred Students in Residence. 

About Two Hundred Students by Correspondence. 

In Session all of the time — no Summer vacation. 

Tuition Free to West Virginia Students. 

Young Women admitted to all Departments the same as 

young men. 
Three handsome new buildings to be erected at once. 
Excellent Gymnasium and fine Athletic Field. 
Cadet Corps of 144 men — Cadets receive Free Books and 

Free Uniforms. 

Cb« Cltiiversity has the following Colleges, Schools, and 
Departments : 

College of Arts and Sciences ; College of Engineering 
and Mechanic Arts ; College of Law ; College of Agri- 
culture ; School of Music ; Preparatory Schools ; Com- 
mercial School ; Department of Elocution ; Department 
of Drawing and Painting ; Department of Military 
Science ; Department of Physical Training ; Premedical 
Department ; Department of Domestic Science ; De- 
partment of Instruction by Correspondence. 

Che School of )Mu8tc has six instructors. Tuition free 
in all Stringed Instruments ; very low in Piano and Voice. 
All regular classes in Drawing free. Fees small for pri- 
vate instruction in Drawing and Painting. 

Che Summer Quarter begins July 1, and continues 
twelve weeks. All departments in full operation. It is 
not a "Summer school," but is a part of the University 
year. In addition to the regular faculty, eminent special- 
ists from other in.stitutions give courses of lectures. Ex- 
penses for entire twelve weeks, including board, may be 
made less than $50.00. Teachers will find the Summer 
Quarter of inestimable value. Students attending the Sum- 
mer Quarter may continue their work by correspondence. 

For catalogue and full information, write to 

JEROME H. RAYMOND, President, 

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. 



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